Jim and his Cre8Buzz family started Cre8Buzz on a shoestring two years ago, as so many social networks are born these days. They ran into behind the scenes problems, and started looking to their members for help. The BuzzBoard was born a few months ago, and I ‘met’ Jim and the crew for the first time after being a user since the early days of the Buzz.

I watched them struggle through each growing pain, knowing that part of their problem was not having the cash flow you need to ramp up development quickly in this rapid paced social networking climate. I started to help them learn to use media like Seesmic and Twitter to get the word out about Cre8Buzz and get people excited about it in its second year of existence.

Interest is growing, and the user base continues to use the site as a great resource for user generated content, but Jim and the Cre8Buzz family no longer have the resources to continue trying to get their baby past this hump and into the next level of existence. What to do?

They have agonized over solutions to the problem, not wanting to just walk away from something they worked so hard on and that was continuing to grow in spite of its rocky start. The people who made Cre8Buzz just don’t want to abandon it like some unwanted child, and they don’t really want to sell it to someone who doesn’t understand what they have built. Then they hit upon an innovative idea.

Why not use Cre8Buzz and it’s user base as a head start to help a young coder?

I fell in love with Jim’s idea instantly, and offered to help him get the word out. Here is what is on the table:

One two year old network built on Rails. A healthy user base of 4000+ members who are very enthusiastic about the site and who have high hope for its future. A site framework that is about 90% complete as is, or that can be tweaked by the right developer. A healthy number of topic-based channels (Moms, Seniors, Dads, Television buffs, Writers, Sports, Music, etc) under the umbrella of which users put up original content. All of the tools used by the users: blogs, forums, profiles, photos, videos, music, podcasts, and more.

What Cre8Buzz wants in return for giving you this site: a percentage of the profit if you make it work. Nothing if you don’t.

This is an unprecedented chance at a working social network. If you know a Rails developer who would like the chance to make it their own and make it grow, please contact Cre8Buzz CEO Jim Keenan via Twitter, or contact me here in the comments and I’ll make sure he gets the message. Please feel free to forward this to developers you may know.

At the moment, Cre8Buzz is still in beta, which means you need an invitation from a beta tester like myself to try it out. If you want an invite, let me know in the comments and I’ll see about getting one to you so that you can come play, too.

When you sign up for Cre8Buzz, you are immediately grouped with like minded people by being asked to choose the Cre8Buzz category you want your profile to be associated with first. I liked this immediately – unlike other social networking sites, this gives you a roster of potential friends and contacts that share your interests or that do what you do. I chose the category “Technology” and the subcategory “Apple”, because of my love of all things Apple. Right away I started getting profile views from other Apple cult members afficionados.

Once you are associated with a category and/or subcategory, you are taken to your profile page. The first thing you notice is that you have places to post podcasts, videos, links to your sites and blogs, photos, and a profile photo of yourself. You also have a Cre8Buzz blog to use if you don’t already have your own. You are also automatically linked to discussion forums associated with your main category or subcategory.

The upload features of each of the media types are incredibly simple to use. Uploading your blog or web site link gets you a “filler” photo at first, which then automatically updates with your blog header over time. Uploading photos to your gallery seems to have some glitches – currently, each time I tried to upload a photo, it uploaded two copies. It was no trouble to go back in and delete the photo, but to have to take the extra step was annoying. I’m sure this will be fixed before they get our of beta.

The podcasts I listened to on other member’s profiles were clear and easy to hear. The videos had a decent playback rate – no buffering delays. All of the pages of the site load quickly, and I like the initial uniform appearance. As much fun as you can have designing a page on MySpace, the fact is some people just shouldn’t be allowed – there is a lot of ugly MySpace out there. Cre8Buzz offers similar CSS and HTML design options to MySpace, but without the restricted CSS hobbles that cause so much of the MySpace eye pain. I’m hoping that eliminates ugly profiles, but that remains to be seen – not a lot of beta users have started using that new theme design feature yet that I could find.

One thing I would love to see change is the forum interface. On one hand, it is basic and easy to use. On the other hand, it is a little too basic. You don’t have any options for in post hyperlinks, or for text editing. It is just a straight subject line and plain text entry box. This is fine for most things, but if I want to support an argument I’m making, I want to be able to link to sites that have the facts I’m calling upon to make my point, not just tell people the full URL and hope they know how to copy and paste it into their browser. Their Cre8Buzz built in personal blogs have the same problem. I tried using html tags here to make active links and change text formatting, but they are disabled.

Overall I found Cre8Buzz to be on to something good with their easy to use, simple interface. I also liked their multi-media options as a way to fully use their web space and get the message out about you and your interests in an interesting manner. Their photos are clear, the podcasts are problem free, and their videos load quickly.

If they handle a few beta glitches like the double photo uploads and the lack of hyperlink and formatting capabilities, I think they could easily surpass the success of MySpace and FaceBook for the young professional and young creative sets.

My original version found at Profy site